Rise in Tijuana homicides raises concerns

Baja California Police and investigators a graduation ceremony this month from a course on tactics to combat street-level drug trafficking.The course was sponsored by the U.S. State Department through the Merida Initiative.
— Sandra Dibble

Baja California Police and investigators a graduation ceremony this month from a course on tactics to combat street-level drug trafficking.The course was sponsored by the U.S. State Department through the Merida Initiative.
/ Sandra Dibble

TIJUANA  After two years of decline, a significant rise in Tijuana homicides in recent months is prompting calls for state and municipal authorities to step up crime-fighting efforts.

The official count from Jan. 1 to the beginning of last week was 512, a sharp increase over last year’s total of 364 and the highest level since 2010, when the tally reached 820.

State investigators said the great majority of the crimes have taken place in well-identified, low-income parts of the city, within the underworld of neighborhood drug dealers.

The increase has put pressure on Tijuana’s new mayor, Jorge Astiazarán, and Baja California’s new governor, Francisco Vega de Lamadrid, to take action.

“We don’t want to wait a month, we don’t want to wait a couple of weeks,” said Roberto Quijano, an attorney and head of the public safety committee of Consejo Coordinador Empresarial, an influential business umbrella group in Tijuana. “We have to be very, very concerned about what is going on right now.”

Quijano said authorities and civil society have been letting down their guard in recent months as the former administration ended and a new team prepared to take over. “Years ago, security was the No. 1 topic in the minds of society, of government, of businesses,” Quijano said. “We somehow relaxed our demands.”

Jorge Escalante, president of the business group Coparmex, issued a statement Tuesday saying, “It’s important to change strategy, and there is no question we need to continue coordinating among the three levels of government.”

Tijuana’s location on a major drug corridor to the United States has for years pushed up the city’s homicide rates. The numbers spiked to a record 844 in 2008 during a bloody and public power struggle between rival drug-trafficking groups. They waged gunbattles in public thoroughfares, killed police officers and left gruesome displays that included bodies hung from highway overpasses, decapitated corpses and those with taunting messages attached.

This year’s killings have not commanded the same level of public attention, with most of the victims shot to death far from the city’s well-to-do neighborhoods and bustling business districts.

Many of the more recent battles are being fought among the lowest-ranking members of the drug trade in the vast working-class areas of Tijuana where foreign tourists and the city’s wealthy residents rarely tread, said Victor Clark, a human-rights activist and longtime observer of the city’s crime trends.

“We are two Tijuanas,” he said.

The killing of 25-year-old Paulino Cortez Garcia would be a case in point. Shot repeatedly with a 9 mm handgun on Aug. 30, his body was left on an unpaved street in a southern area of the city known as La Gloria.

Two months later, on Oct. 27, the Baja California Attorney General’s Office announced the detention of two suspects who belonged to a rival street gang. The victim belonged to a group known as Los Pelones, which was selling drugs in neighborhoods claimed by the rival group, Los Guichos.

José María González, Baja California’s deputy attorney general for organized crime, estimates that three-quarters of the killings are linked to the neighborhood drug trade, known as narcomenudeo. He said another significant contributing factor to the increase has been the presence of U.S. deportees, because some of them join the ranks of the city’s criminal underworld.